


How The Hollyhocks Bloom

by batcavemasquerade



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Good Ol' Vietnam, Keep All Arms And Legs Inside The Vehicle, M/M, Other, Time Travel, What Have I Done, What Kind Of Fuckery Is This?, buckle up boys, this is gonna be a bumpy ride
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-01-14 14:52:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 19,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18478504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batcavemasquerade/pseuds/batcavemasquerade
Summary: In which Klaus Hargreeves, a retired pacifist, is dumped headfirst into the Vietnam War. Klaus never comes home and his brothers and sisters claw their way back to him, one by one, after the end of the world.AKA: The siblings go back to the 1960s to regroup and to get a few measly moments of goddamned peace and quiet, and find Klaus serving in the Vietnam War, different and sober as can be.





	1. Bring Your Knees In Tight -- Monday, December 25th, 1967

**Author's Note:**

> Song: Man Out Of Time by Elvis Costello
> 
> The title of this chapter is from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, specifically The Time Warp!
> 
> Hopefully this isn't too painful to read, it's my first attempt at any fan-work -- I'll be adding more chapters soon-ish but until then, I hope you enjoy!!

Klaus really should have known better -- sure, he wasn't the brightest bulb in the box most days, and yeah, he had gotten absolutely wasted the minute he escaped from Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-fuck, but under normal circumstances it would be completely rational to assume that a briefcase would act like a briefcase. Said briefcase had one, very hard to screw up job. Maybe it would even have money in it! Or maybe Howie Mandel would descend from the heavens in order to tell him he was in an episode of Deal or No Deal and he was really some random dude named Robert, who knew. He expected something entirely normal, a mistake if there ever was one when he considered the whirlwind that was his life, and eagerly flipped open the little clasps holding the damned thing closed.

So what was in it, you may ask yourself? Money? A never ending supply of cocaine and AstroGlide? A one way ticket to Fiji with a nice, shirtless Italian? 

No dice.

Instead, as Klaus found out quickly and painfully, he picked the one magical suitcase that takes you to another fucking dimension, or whatever you would call the place he had been unceremoniously dumped in. He just wasn't in Kansas anymore, that was for sure. One minute he was sitting across from a sweet lady on the bus -- Klaus had shot her a wink and her face lit up like the fairy lights strewn across his bedroom walls, how cute -- and the next he was flat on his ass in what looked like some fucked up slumber party. There was bed after bed, lined up in a neat row and all in different states of disarray; some had helmets and jackets tossed onto them haphazardly, others had face-down men snoring and drooling into their pillows, and others were just -- glaringly empty. 

The bed across from him, however, housed a bewildered, beautiful man with plush pink lips and sleep-tousled brown hair. Forget the Italian, this guy had him beat by a country mile. He was an absolute specimen. 

Klaus just stared -- he probably looked a bit idiotic with his mouth hanging open, gazing into the deep blue eyes of a complete stranger, but he really, really didn't care. He’d been sifting through the one-liners inside his muddled brain, just about to ask him if he was in heaven. It wasn’t original, Klaus knew as much, but if he learned anything in his long, excruciatingly insane lifetime, it was that every shot not taken will inevitably miss, and gunshot wounds should not be cleaned with vinegar.

And that was when everything went to shit.

"Move, ladies, go, go, go!"

The man in front of him flinched and blinked out of his stupor, bolting out of his cot in order to hurriedly get dressed. It was a pity, he looked so good without a shirt.

"O'Connor, get your ass out of bed! Katz, get this kid some clothes," at that the man gestured at Klaus who, as per usual, had no idea what was going on. Generally he would have a vague idea of what he should be doing, he was almost always the look-out, after all, but for the first time since he was a kid he had little to no grasp on the situation. If he hadn’t been so panicked he might have found the experience freeing.

But he was overwhelmed with a sense of nausea and the knowledge that whatever was happening was wrong, he wasn’t supposed to be here, and in a matter of moments some pants were shoved into his hands and a helmet was plopped on top of his head, shouts and yells sounding off from all angles. He didn't know what to do other than follow orders and 'put on some god-damned pants'. He at least had the sense to stow the briefcase under a random cot -- the one belonging to pretty boy, if he remembered correctly -- and struggled into the clothes he was handed. He didn't even have a chance to lace his boots up fully before he was ushered out the tent and into a mud splattered truck. Klaus pointedly ignored a stain that looked an awful lot like a pool of blood.

Katz, as he'd been called by his superior, sat nearby, a row behind Klaus. No one spoke until after the truck started up and they were on the move, not that he expected anyone to -- they’d all just been roused from a somewhat decent slumber and, if his siblings were any indication, were not likely to be conversational for the better part of an hour, no matter how confused he was.

Klaus had made some bizarre first impressions in his lifetime but this one took the metaphorical lava cake. 

A few minutes after they drove off the truck shaking with an increasing intensity, bouncing from side to side whenever they hit a rock. It was enough to make a (recovering) junkie nauseous and he prayed to whatever God or soulless child in responsible for his existence that he would be able to keep from losing his lunch on the seats of the truck. He was in the middle of a daydream about a fattening, loaded cheeseburger avec tout when Klaus felt a tap on his shoulder.

"I'm Dave," the man formerly known as Katz said. He offered his hand, which Klaus clasped firmly, grinning. The kid had a grip, he noted, and his brain helpfully pointed out that he could throw him across the room no problem. It also pointed out that he really would not mind being thrown around like a ragdoll if Corporal Handsome was the one doing it. He held Dave’s hand for a few seconds longer than necessary. 

"Klaus."

As much as the newly crowned Private Klaus Hargreeves would like to flirt this man's pants off this was neither the place, nor the time. He was in, what, the sixties? He's sure he would fit right into the hippie mentality given his “eccentric” tastes, but he knew for a fact that some wouldn't take too kindly to his more flamboyant tendencies -- especially the ones involving red lipstick and pretty boys in the dark corners of house parties. He didn't know about Davey-boy but Klaus really wasn't in the mood for being stoned to death. At least not in that context. He would, however, take very kindly to death by a left-handed cigarette. 

The group of soldiers, plus the one resigned member of the Hargreeves family, spilled out of the truck and onto muddy, bug infested ground. Klaus did his best to keep from flinching, vomiting, crying. He couldn’t lose his marbles the second something went a little haywire, now could he? He had to keep his shit together and to do that, he needed to not vomit his entire brain out onto his jungle boots. Pretty boy -- Dave -- was a welcome distraction with all his silly questions, much like the one he asked when the truck was pulling away to safety.

"You know how to shoot that thing?"

Klaus grinned, tapping the side of the M-16 he was holding close to his chest. Thanks to his time at the academy he could take the rifle in his hand apart and put it back together, easy as a breeze, and on a good day he could be considered a good shot. He wasn't quite as experienced as Five was when it came to blowing someone's brains out, no one ever was, but his father had made damn sure he could take care of himself -- otherwise he was a liability, and he's sure you all know his father's impressions on people who are liabilities. 

"I get by," was Klaus' answer, a lopsided smile plastered onto his face.

To Dave it was the understatement of the century. The moment that kid set foot on the ground he was aiming and firing with a deadly accuracy he’d only seen in well trained soldiers, in men who’d been in the shit for years -- but he didn’t hear the familiar screams of death, just yelps and cries as kneecaps and shoulders were blown out of place. Klaus didn't want to, and never had, killed someone; not even on the missions where it would have mattered. He wasn't exactly fond of the middle of a war, a war that he would later find out went down in history as being cruel and unnecessary, to be the place he would start. 

Klaus heard a whoop of excitement from beside him and startled when a strong hand clapped his shoulder. A hand on his shoulder was usually accompanied by the firm glare of Luther, or the icy cold grip of his father before he was sentenced to a night in the mausoleum. This was different though -- neither Luther or Sir Reginald Hargreeves were present, neither of them could hurt him -- and in their place was a gritty man, somewhere in his thirties, beaming down at him.

"Welcome to Vietnam, kid," one of the other soldiers had said, almost sounding proud of him. It was an unfamiliar feeling, someone being proud, and in his shock he missed Dave's sad smile from a few feet away.

So he was in Vietnam, in some unknown year, holding a gun almost as big as he was and seated smack in the middle of death and flying shrapnel. Klaus couldn't see any way that could possibly go wrong, no sir. With a grim glance around him he realized that he’d seen the faces of the men around him in pictures and, with a pang in his chest, realized that he’d seen some of their obituaries plastered on the walls of various bars he frequented.

Five would have a field day if he could see this, he was sure. What would Five even do in his situation? He could jump forward, knew all the rules of the time game, was cold and ruthless. Klaus was none of those things and thought long and hard while taking out a small group of opposing soldier’s ankles.

His being there would raise more than a few questions, but the main problem lay in the distinct lack of dog-tags on his chest. Where the silver metal would rest on another man's ribs they would find nothing on Klaus' person, matching his lack of identity perfectly. He may not have had a name, a family, or a past outside of the war in Bumfuck, Egypt, nineteen sixty-whatever-the-hell, but when he considered the alternative of going back to the end of all things, he didn't mind staying a little while. And if that meant he would come out a new man, well, wasn't that for the best?

Private Klaus Hargreeves certainly thought so. All he had to do was get some dog-tags and do what he did best: lie.


	2. The Second Time's Always The Worst -- Friday, March 22nd, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah withdrawal, thou art a cruel mistress and thy mother was a wench. 
> 
> In which something's gotta give, sobriety is tedious, and Klaus is a mother hen to two dumb-ass soldiers. 
> 
> WARNING: Some gross mentions of gore and talk about up-chucking, so proceed with caution, babes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Hello, Goodbye by The Beatles
> 
> Fun fact: I wrote a good chunk of this chapter whilst in a corset and can I just tell you that sitting down in one of those things is simultaneously really comfortable and awkward as h e l l, it's nuts--

Withdrawal was a bitch. Withdrawal in the middle of the Vietnam War was a let-me-speak-to-your-manager,-but-do-get-on-with-it-for-I-have-to-cuss-out-Karen-at-the-PTA-meeting-later-today mega-bitch. But somehow, with Dave smiling approvingly at him and the few fast friends he made soothing his nerves, Klaus didn't think it was so bad. He could vomit out his own god-damned spleen and he'd still be happy as can be because he was with Dave, and Dave was proud of him. 

Still, Janice and her brownies deserved to go to hell, he decided in his delusional state.

And so there he sat on the edge of his cot, a bucket that smelled weirdly like chicken tenders and craw-fish in his lap, with the occasional soldier passing by to ruffle his hair or to whisper encouragement. It was no secret that he was an ex-junkie, and it was even less of a secret what withdrawal did to the human body. With every bout of shivers he’d find six or seven blankets piled on top of his body, with every wave of nausea there was someone at his back, speaking soothing words and rubbing circles into his skin. It was plain as day that he was sick -- he was burning up and freezing at the same time and his head felt like it’d been used as a knife block. He’d make a very pretty knife block, admittedly.

With the withdrawal came the hysteria, the hallucinations, and the growing awareness of a panic set deep in Klaus’ chest. The ghosts would dance around him, calling his name, and he could do nothing but shake in fear, feet firm on the ground and jaw clenched tight enough to snap teeth.

James Kowalski kneeled in front of him thirty-or-so minutes into one of his episodes, brown eyes staring up at him with nothing but platonic fondness and concern. Klaus couldn’t hear what he said but he smiled anyway -- Jamie always knew what to say to fix things. At some points he had to wonder if it was really the words that mattered, or if it was just the knowledge that the grumpy coot had a soft spot for the kids in their unit. It would be so easy for him to chide and torment Klaus, to press every nerve exposed by his condition, but instead he treated him with a gentle hand and pushed through everything with a grace that Klaus didn’t think he could ever possess.

He only left when Sergeant Dunahee screamed out for all hands on deck, and even then he did so with a heaviness Klaus hadn’t seen before. It was like all of his bones were tied to sandbags and he was struggling to fight against them, wanting nothing more than to stay by his friend’s side. Klaus dumbly noticed the cold metal of the other man’s dog-tags where they’d been pressed into his hands, purposefully left behind in his hurry to leave.

If James got hurt while he was gone Klaus was going to riot, sick or not. He’d steal a truck and drive into Hell -- they all knew that was where Vietnam soldiers went as far as the media was concerned -- and he would pull him out by the scruff of his neck just to kill him again. Honestly, what kind of idiot left his dog-tags behind when going into a fight, it was the only thing that could identify him if shit went south. Still, Klaus gripped onto the mixture of nickel and copper like it would disappear if he let go for a moment or two. 

He watched soldiers bustle in and out of the tent, watched his stomach contents steadily drain into the bucket at his feet, and he waited. He waited for everything to be a dream, for his eyes to open and see the wall of some filthy back alley. He waited for his siblings to shake him awake like nothing had happened. He waited for Dave and Kowalski to stumble in with drinks in hand and exhausted expressions, leaving mud wherever they went. They all needed a vacation, Klaus thought. Maybe they could go to some seedy bar in the boonies and drink until they pruned -- anything sounded better than the jungle, and he was sure that every man in their tent would agree with him.

The latter was the one to happen but, instead of vodka and whiskey, both men were carrying the weight of the war, M-16s perched on their shoulders and chests littered with bruises. Dave in particular looked like he would cry if a penny dropped. Klaus made an executive decision and pushed the urge to puke to the back of his mind, carefully concealing the bucket under his bed, and steered both men by the elbow to a more secluded section of the tent. After the cursory look-over in which a frantic Klaus checked for injuries or internal damage, he sat them down next to cases of what looked like ammunition or MREs. He made sure they they could press their backs up against the crates, feel something secure and solid behind them. That always helped him when he felt like he would lose it.

“Spill,” he ordered, earning two blank, confused looks for his efforts. He rolled his eyes when exasperation and concern bubbled up in his stomach. “Tell me what happened, it can’t be very good if pretty-boy looks like he’s about to lose his Froot-Loops.”

The two men exchanged a look before casting their eyes to the floor. Klaus’ eyebrows furrowed -- what in God’s name could have happened to make them look so upset? James, bless his heart, took the responsibility of relaying the tale to the very confused man above him.

“We, uh, we found a body,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. Judging by his reaction it wasn’t anyone they knew, but it’d rattled him in some way or another. “Things were gettin’ a bit hairy and we’d forgotten that you wasn’t with us, so when we turned around we saw someone face-down in the mud clutchin’ a pair o’ dog-tags and a mop of messy curly hair on his head. It looked just like you, kid. A dead fuckin’ ringer.”

Oh, so that was it. Klaus struggled not to snort at the unintentional pun, holding out James’ dog-tags and letting them fall into the man’s lap with a soft jingle. He also reached out to smack said man on the back of his head, quietly fussing over him for being a shit, and shifted until the fabric of his worn out pants knocked into Dave’s knee. The contact seemed to help, even if the man looked like he wanted to hop the first flight home and never look back. Klaus could understand -- he’d worn that expression after every nightmare or, in some cases, every loss. He hoped humor would be enough to fix it this time.

“I’m too pretty to go anywhere, you know,” he muttered conspiratorially. “Who else can keep the group morale high, huh?”

“Oh, yeah,” James snorted. “You was a vision when you were pukin’ your guts out earlier.”

Klaus hissed and swatted at him again with the arm that Dave wasn’t bruising with his grip -- he’d grabbed it sometime during the conversation and, though it hurt, Klaus wouldn’t dream of making him let go -- reveling in the puff of air he managed to squeeze out of the bigger of the two. 

“Fuck off, I’m a gift to the human race,” he chortled.

“I thought only the bad kids got coal,” Dave quipped, lacking his usual enthusiasm but trying nonetheless.

“Maybe Santa thinks we’ve been naughty boys,” Klaus replied, waggling his eyebrows despite the wave of nausea. “I sure as fuck haven’t been a good one, let’s be realistic here.”

Klaus found it endearing that David Katz -- a man who was best known for his dry humor, his blunt truths, and straight to the point ways -- would get so worked up over the underfed junkie who’d been dumped in his lap. He might not have been drugged out of his mind anymore but he was still jittery, still a cause of concern for the men around camp. And yet the people around him, Dave especially, took one look, one good hard look at the shit he hid behind his pupils, and decided that he was the one they wanted to trust. He’d called him an angel a few times, joking that he’d fallen from the heavens instead of some shitty, filthy bus downtown.

Klaus had been in Vietnam for a few months, coming in approximately four weeks after the Battle of Dak To, which took place in nineteen sixty-seven. In that time he’d become something of a good luck charm for the members of the 173rd; he’d saved their asses more than once when the ghosts had it in them to be useful, telling them where the mines would fail to work or where the ground was the most stable to venture out on. He always knew more than he ought to about the men who’d passed on the field, talking like they were still around or like he knew their deepest secrets. Sure, he was a skinny fucker and could barely do anything against the bigger guys he went up against, but he was wily and fought dirty and the taste of blood took an almost permanent residence on the tip of his tongue.

But he wasn’t known around the camp for his fighting -- he was known as the kid who knew a little too much about Star Trek, the kid who could talk anyone down from the ledge and talk himself out of trouble with his silver tongue, the kid who, no matter what, would be by your side if you needed him. He was more than a soldier or a number here, he was family. Klaus only wished that he’d been accepted so easily into his legal one.

And Dave, the lovely man he was, was the main reason for Klaus’ newfound, painful sobriety.

Green snapped him out of his thoughts and he tuned back into the benign banter, looking at something that neither man could see. It was someone flipped a switch to change their hyper, fun loving friend back into the sick and shivery kid he was when they first walked in. 

“What was it like?” he asked, a rare serious expression on his face. “The body, I mean?”

This time Dave spoke up, sighing and voice stiff with discomfort. He didn’t want to answer, that much was obvious, but he pushed on in his usual blunt and abrupt manner. Klaus wagered a guess that he’d only shared what he saw as a cautionary tale -- he still hadn’t let go of Klaus’ arm and the sliver of skin on the crook of his elbow was beginning to go raw.

“He took a bullet straight to the face. Pretty much blew his jaw off, went in between the eyes and came out near the throat. The eyes were wide open and bright fuckin’ green, just like yours. ”

Klaus listened to the description and gazed behind one of the cots, eyes focused on something far away. Curly black hair, shiny green eyes, an indiscernible tattoo on his wrist. For all intents and purposes it sounded like his doppelganger. The grotesque, human shaped thing let out a disturbing gurgling noise and he watched blankly as a glob of what looked to be blood and brain matter slid out of the gaping hole in its throat. It hit the floor with a wet splat, Klaus paling and following its descent with his eyes. And then he was gagging and James was running, through the ghost, to get the bucket, getting it to him just before the acidic remains of the day before’s lunch came back up. 

Dave fussed over him, clucking with sympathy and trying to comfort the skin and bones, but Klaus couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of blood in his ears, couldn’t see anything other than the dead, empty eyes staring back at him. It was one thing to see a ghost you were unfamiliar with -- he hadn’t been familiar with any ghost before Ben, and even Ben wasn’t quite the same after death -- but seeing something so similar to your own face, staring at you with pleading eyes was a bit too much. If it were anyone else, if things weren’t so consistently fucked up, Klaus could have written it off as a coincidence. He could have pretended that the dead kid standing in the corner just bore a strong resemblance to him, and that there were plenty of people with green eyes and curly mops of hair. 

Only problem was, that was /definitely/ his face, and the hands it reached out with said hello and goodbye.


	3. I've Got The Blues And So Do You -- Sunday, March 24th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Klaus' fever breaks, Dave is hell-bent on getting some more smokes, and communicating is hard.
> 
> WARNING: There's some more gross stuff in here, so if you're squeamish I'm really sorry! It's not as bad as the last chapter I think--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Learnin' The Blues by Frank Sinatra
> 
> Hopefully this isn't as much of a cliffhanger as last time -- also this might end up being a lot more than twenty chapters, so buckle up kids!!

Over the course of three days -- the three days it took for him to sweat and puke out the rest of the drugs he’d put in his system -- Klaus got to know the ghost on an intimate level. They never exchanged words, they couldn't really, not when one of them was missing most of his bottom jaw and part of his skull, but he began to pick out subtle differences between the two. Sure, they shared the same pairs of eyes and the same tattoos but the ghost -- who he'd started to refer to as Gurgle because of the God-awful sounds he made whenever he tried to speak -- was younger than he was. Younger by three, four months maybe. It wasn't much but it was just enough to be noticeable by the man who'd lived the same life; he was missing some of the scars and some of the bruises, had yet to come to terms with some of his mistakes. The ghost lacked some of the experiences, some of the knowledge that he had and, as far as he was concerned, that made Klaus the more mature of the pair -- the alpha, if you will.

Yes, they lived practically identical lives up to a specific point -- their differences stemming off of their one way ticket to Fuck-ville, Timbuktu if he had to guess -- but Klaus considered them to be drastically different people.

Gurgle wasn't phased by the dead, for one, but that was largely due to the fact that he himself was as dead as the metaphorical door-nail. That being said he also paid them no mind, like he couldn't see the corpses milling around him or simply didn't care. A ghost could stare him straight in the face, screaming and yelling for an inch of attention, and he would look on, look /through/ them like nothing was there. Klaus was beginning to think that he was an un-diagnosed schizophrenic and Gurgle, being some sort of weird, vivid hallucination, was unable to interact with the dead. All he knew was that Gurgle was one lucky mother-fucker if he was able to ignore a guy with his intestines looped around his neck like a fuckin’ fleshy pink feather boa.

He wasn’t a hallucination, though. Hallucinations couldn’t pull off the nonplussed expression the kid wore, not like that, and they didn’t stare longingly at MRE mush like it was the nectar of life. When Ben passed on, however, he took to living vicariously through Klaus, watching him like a hawk each time he ate, trying to remember how each individual component of a meal tasted. If the hungry look in the kid’s eyes was any indication, he was doing the same thing.

Unlike Gurgle, Klaus still remembered the freezing cold walls of the mausoleum on his back, remembered screaming his throat raw to be heard over the groaning of the deceased -- he was still afraid of them, trying to keep from meeting their eyes if at all possible. Without his brother to dull their panicked, sometimes enraged voices, they were loud enough to deafen him, loud enough to make him flinch and make his ears ring for minutes on end. Klaus couldn’t remember a time that he could hear out of his left ear perfectly, not after a female ghost let out a screech high enough to shatter glass right next to his eardrum, wailing about how she’d been too young to go and how it was all her husband’s fault. He’d thought she could be an opera singer, if she were still alive. 

He felt for her, honestly -- her husband sounded like a dick for stabbing her and all.

Gurgle, as Klaus discovered with a sinking feel in his chest, was content to follow him wherever he went. If he did so much as take a shit Gurgle was there, looking over his shoulder, and he wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take -- not when they couldn’t communicate properly, not when Klaus could see his top molars up close and personal. He didn’t like the idea of being watched in general, but sometimes it just crossed -- or catapulted over, really -- the line into perversion. 

“Seriously, man, you’ve got to stop watching me sleep,” he’d said after a particularly uncomfortable nap. Gurgle just arched an eyebrow, like he was daring Klaus to do something about it.

He didn’t. He just turned around to face Dave, who was passed the fuck out and snoring in the next cot over, and pointedly ignored the sound of steadily dripping of blood when he closed his eyes.

On the last day of his fever, the day it finally broke and he felt well enough to eat solids, Gurgle did something other than slink around the tent, coughing up a lung like he had a hairball. Klaus had grown accustomed to the hoarse rattling sounds, the wet hacking whenever his counterpart tried to speak, but he could tell that his inability to speak frustrated him. Klaus could sense that much, and he wasn’t terribly surprised when Gurgle took another approach, tried something new for once. There was a groan, a flapping hand trying to get his attention, and then a shaky and bloody attempt at four signs that the living Hargreeves recognized. 

Boy. Blue. Light. Time.

The family had all learned a bit of sign language for the sake of missions, even going so far as to use it when they needed to silently plan out maneuvers, or more recently, when Diego couldn't force his words to cooperate. Klaus knew a bit more than the others -- he lost his voice or lost his hearing more often than not -- and his fingers itched at the familiarity of the words. Klaus watched as the other man signed one last word, index fingers coming together but not quite touching, rotating. He could see Gurgle's eyebrows furrowing, trying to use the expressive facial cues sign language utilized; a feat which Klaus assumed to be very difficult what with only half of a face intact. But the kid looked like he’d tried to eat a grenade for breakfast, he was thoroughly impressed that he made /any/ expression. Klaus frowned, processing the last word.

Hurt.

“You’re not supposed to talk with your mouth full, you know.”

Gurgle rolled his eyes so hard that Klaus was convinced they would fall out of his skull. The mental imagery alone was enough to make him gag, the squishing sound of viscera smacking the floor forever burned into his memory. Klaus imagined what his response would have been and was happy to discover that great minds, in fact, thought alike -- he earned a one finger salute and a withering glare for his trouble, just like expected. Leave it to him to be an ass, predictable as that may be. But what was he supposed to make of that? Blue, boy, time, light -- they were all things that pertained to his brother who, as far as he knew, was happily fending off the apocalypse in the not-so-distant future. 

“I’m not sure what you want from me, kid, but we can talk about this after I sleep, yeah?”

Well, Klaus could talk and Gurgle could do whatever he wanted.

Over the course of his withdrawal Kowalski and Dave took everything in with a grain of salt, brushing the occasional one sided conversation off as a side effect of his illness. They still coddled him, pulling him out on the other end of sickness, but they could only do so much to fix the mush that was his brain -- it felt like someone shoved a metal rod up his nose and through his skull and was trying, very insistently, to pull his brain out of his head. So these conversations, as odd as they appeared, didn’t phase them in the slightest. Dave simply glanced up from the game of gin rummy he was playing -- his opponent was a rather burly man they’d dubbed Gurney -- and upon seeing Klaus alone shrugged, took a puff of his cigar, and went back to his cards. He was well on his way to winning another pack of cigarettes and, as much as he loved Klaus, he wasn't prepared to let the prospect of a nicotine fix slip through his fingers.

Kowalski would have had a similar reaction, Klaus thought, but he’d disappeared into the mess tent in pursuit of some “decent god-damned booze” and didn’t want to tempt the newly sober Private. Bless him, he was a big softy underneath his hardened exterior -- someone could whack him firmly on the noggin with a spoon and he’d explode into a cloud of edible glitter and marshmallow fluff. Klaus would pay good, /legally earned/ money to see such a thing happen.

Gurgle grew more insistent, stamping his foot and clenching his fists. He even snapped his fingers next to the ear on Klaus’ good side, causing Klaus to flinch and make an undignified noise as he felt his body start to stiffen without his permission. Dave kept a wary eye out but continued to play his game, not wanting to make much of a fuss. They’d been doing too much of that lately, fussing. While Klaus appreciated the sentiment, he wanted to handle these things by himself -- even if he could practically feel the cold, clammy fingers of his younger self on his shoulder. He reached over, stealing Dave’s blanket off of his bed, and went about building a nest to ward off the cold.

“Alright, alright, we’ll play charades,” he conceded, throwing his hands up in defeat. “What about Five? He’s the boy, isn’t he? Blue light, time -- I can’t think of any other fucker that those would fit, unless they got one of those suitcases.”

The answer was yes, apparently, and Gurgle clapped his hands, nodding violently enough to sling blood halfway across the room. The blood disappeared moments after it landed, nothingness where it had been smeared across the floor and the few unlucky pairs of boots, but the sight alone was enough to make Klaus shudder in disgust. 

“What about him?” 

Klaus’ teeth were chattering from the cold, either from the presence of the ghosts or from the remnants of his fever, and nothing he did seemed to stave off the goosebumps crawling up his arms. It felt like he was drowning in a pool of ice. 

He watched as Gurgle made the sign for ‘hurt’ again and, just when he expected the kid to drop some ancient wisdom on his head, he started to flicker. Of course he would, Klaus thought, for nothing in his life would ever be that easy. 

Through the frantic flailing he made out three more words.

Old. Here. Danger.

Which would all be well and good if Klaus knew what the fuck it was supposed to mean.


	4. Ink And Gunpowder Love -- Thursday, June 27th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Klaus is in shock, Gurgle is unamused, and Kowalski is a big baby. 
> 
> WARNING: Gunshot wounds and really painfully strained writing up ahead!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Roaring 20s by Panic! At The Disco
> 
> This chapter probably seems a lot more strained? It was a bit hard for me to write just because I really lacked the motivation yesterday and this morning, but!! I tried! I only skimmed through it so there might be a few mistakes and such, I'm sorry!

Klaus hated being right -- hated /Gurgle/ being right even more.

Another three months had passed since Klaus and Gurgle’s conversation of sorts, and he found himself in a run-down tattoo shop surrounded by James, Dave, Gurney, Billy, and Bono -- they’d decided to spend leave together, they spent enough time together as it was and things were safer with a buddy system, or at least it was smarter. Billy had a habit of fighting when he was drunk so, naturally, he was paired with Kowalski. Klaus couldn’t think of anything better suited for conflict de-escalation than the six foot four, built-like-a-tree country hick; not even Gurney who was pushing three hundred pounds of sheer fuckin’ muscle. Instead, Gurney was paired with Bono, a tiny kid who could almost keep up with the amount of vodka he drank, and the two were planning to disappear to a dive bar the moment they could slip away. Not that they were slick enough to leave unnoticed. Dave and Klaus were paired together and, while Klaus adored his company and would gladly spend an entire day with him, he had a sneaking suspicion that their friends were trying to kill him. 

They’d been cultivating half a year of tension, sexual or not, but Klaus was intent on keeping things between them as they were -- no way in hell was he going to ruin a close friendship, ruin the way that they trusted and loved each other, for the silly fluttering he felt in his chest whenever Dave stared a few seconds too long, or when he fell asleep on Klaus’ bony shoulder. 

But he digressed.

Klaus was no stranger to tattoos, nor was he a stranger to the feeling of cold pleather on skin, or the buzz of a needle lulling his thoughts to sleep. He had four tattoos, after all, and had spent countless hours of his youth getting pictures carved into his skin. The first two, after that cursed umbrella on the soft skin of his wrist, were easy enough to see: an inky hello and goodbye visible to anyone he waved to on the street, further solidifying his place as a human ouija board. They'd started to fade where they sat on his palms, he noted briefly, eyeing the spots where the ink had begun to rub out. He'd have to get them touched up eventually. 

The fourth tattoo was his favorite, hidden just below the waistband of his well-worn fatigues -- not even Dave had seen that one.

"Bite me," it said. 

So naturally, Klaus wasn't all too phased when the 173rd tried to talk him into getting another one. He simply shrugged, tossed his jacket in Gurney's face, and told them to get it over with, he had shit to do. He also had /people/ to do, but that was beside the point. He wasn't going to waste his leave considering things, thank you very much, he was going to do them and move on -- a tattoo was just another thing on his checklist of things to get out of the way before they returned to the hot, wet expanses of jungle. Another thing on the list was learning how to play pool and, there on the very bottom of the mental list in Klaus’ scrawling handwriting, there was the tiny little word “remember”.

When the needle started Kowalski was arguably more of a pussy than Klaus was -- he'd started turning green in a way that reminded him far too much of Diego, who would blanche and faint at the sight of a catheter without fail. It was kind of cute, honestly. Not in an 'I want to fuck your brains out' kind of way, but more of an 'oh how precious, I'm surrounded by large, wimpy children' way. That's all they were, really. They were all kids who'd been dumped headfirst into a war that started with Eisenhower and had yet to end, even with the death of John F. Kennedy fresh in the nation’s memory.

The tattoo itself didn't take that long, not nearly as long as it took to tattoo his burning palms, and after an hour Klaus was free to go with the fresh branding of the 173rd. He wore it proudly like a thirty day chip, unlike the cattle-branding his father had bestowed upon them. It was one tattoo that Gurgle, who was standing sullenly in the corner with his arms crossed, didn’t have and one one of the many differences between the two. 

The real adventure of the night came shortly after Klaus had gotten his trophy neatly wrapped up and out of the way, waving off the instructions for its care because he was more than familiar with the spiel. There’d been some pointless conversation, mostly about where they were going to eat -- Klaus suggested Mexican, which fell on deaf ears -- or what they were going to do once the other boys got their tattoos done -- eat, Klaus had said -- when a sharp bang rang out and the glass window in front of the shop shattered into thousands of tiny, painful to step on pieces. That event in and of itself wasn’t good, in Klaus’ perpetually fucked opinion, but the quiet, shocked exclamation Dave let out made it sound even worse. 

“Oh, fuck.” 

And that’s when Klaus’ eyes landed on the man who’d done his tattoo -- he lay dead, draped over the chair in front of him, a bullet dead-center in his forehead. Blood dripped steadily onto the tile below and a nice red puddle grew with each passing second. The gunshots didn’t stop, Klaus noticed belatedly, and he tackled Gurney and Billy to the floor. A bullet missed Gurney’s shoulder by an inch or two, as unsettling of a thought that was, and Billy went down easy enough thanks to his status as a twig. Klaus would almost be concerned that he would snap one of the kid’s bones if Billy hadn’t dropped a sixty-pound weight on his leg a week prior and walked away with nothing more than a bruise. He was small, yes, but he was practically indestructible. 

It only took a few days in Vietnam for the fourth Hargreeves sibling to decide he hated being shot at -- it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, really, and on the off-chance that you got hit you were well and truly fucked. Medical expertise in the seventies just wasn’t what it was in the modern day. Sure, they knew how to suture and how to give blood transfusions, but things weren’t nearly as sterile or foolproof as they were in his time. At least when he got shot at in the academy he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wouldn’t lose a limb to gangrene or some other horrifying thing therein. 

“Oh, /shit/, Klaus,” Dave stuttered from his spot behind the counter. Klaus was reminded of Diego for the second time that day. “Is your-- are you okay?”

Normally he would have smacked Dave upside the head for asking stupid questions but, as it stood, Klaus had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Until he followed Dave’s pointer finger downward and saw the bright, angry looking wound on his thigh. Huh, he thought. He’d been shot. If someone without the lower half of their face could say ‘I told you so’, Gurgle was making a valiant effort. 

“I’m fuckin’ peachy, Davy-boy, how are you on this fine day? Good? That’s good.”

Klaus was handling things very well, all things considered. Back in his academy days he would be rolling on the ground and screaming, ever the one for dramatics, but instead of the usual panic he felt relaxed -- calm, even, if that word could be applied to a man coming to terms with a gaping hole in his leg. It was probably the shock. For a moment he thought he saw green and a flash of blue from outside the window. It could have been a coincidence. Klaus landed ass-first in a tent after disappearing in a flash of blue, after all.

“Well slap my ass and call me Kelly, this day is goin’ down the shitter fast,” Klaus giggled, investing all of his energy into being scarily chipper and ignoring the searing pain in his leg. 

His leg protested heavily to the stress it was under, wobbling and creaking like a rotting wooden post. Another gunshot sounded off and the men remaining in the shop flinched. None of them were armed, none of them were up to fighting, and none of them were safe from the hail of metal. A bullet strayed from its original path when it bounced off of the metal table holding the tattoo gun and ink, landing just shy of Klaus’ good ear. He let out a girlish yelp and pressed himself closer to the wall.

“Dave, be a darling and get me behind the counter, yeah? I’m not fond of the idea of being shot twice in one day.”

Bono and Billy helped him instead, dragging him across the floor as gently as they could until he was butted up against the wall next to the cash register. Kowalski was rifling through the drawers to find something useful -- maybe a stapler or a butter knife, who knew -- and Gurney was peeking out of the window in the hopes of finding their attacker. Or attackers, Klaus wasn’t so good with the number thing.

When the gunshots stopped Klaus tried to picture what had happened, picture the shooter that he didn’t see. Well, he’d told them he hadn’t seen anything, but Klaus /had/ caught a glimpse of his attacker. He’d even gone so far as to let them shoot at him because, if he was honest, it was a hell of a lot better if it was him than one of the good old boys around him. He just didn't think he'd catch a bullet in the thigh. But he’d known them, had seen their face, knew them very well if he said so himself, even if they were older and angrier by far, and thus his only question was:

If they were so ruthless, so accurate and calculating, so god-damned good at their job, did they miss? Would they tell their superiors, if they had any, that they missed their target, come back a second time and do it right? Or did they hit exactly what they were aiming for? There were too many questions and too few answers, in Klaus’ opinion. 

If Klaus knew Five at all, he would suggest it was the latter.


	5. God Doesn’t Seem To Like Me Much -- Thursday, June 27th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Five is terrible at explaining things, the great Kosher debate occurs, and Klaus weighs his options.
> 
> WARNING: More gunshot wounds and vague descriptions of injuries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Bang Bang - My Baby Shot Me Down by Nancy Sinatra
> 
> This is the last chapter of the week! I tried my best to make Five explain things but uhhh I'm an idiot with a high school degree so I'm not so good at explaining timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff.

Klaus liked taking orders, he decided. Not from his father -- God, no, that man was a child protective service case worker's simultaneous nightmare and wet dream -- but he took orders very well after he joined the military. Maybe it was because he had something to accomplish, something to do other than be the lookout, which was commonplace during his brief stint in the Umbrella Academy. In the army he was told to get /in/ the van more often than not, except the van was a tank and clearly devoid of Five's stoic plastic love interest, and what he did mattered in some way or another. It made him feel needed, or at least involved in some way or another. Even if his job was moving crates or steering a massive, impossible to wreck vehicle in the middle of a war-zone.

He especially enjoyed it when Dave was the one giving the orders -- his firm and soft voice dripping with enough authority to make his knees week -- not that he would ever admit such a thing to his face. Klaus might have enjoyed it a tiny bit more than necessary, sue him. So when Dave was kneeling in front of him, ordering him to stay awake, he couldn’t help but smile lazily, giving a salute and murmuring an agreement over the growing exhaustion that pulled his bones into the ground.

“If you fall asleep on me, Hargreeves, so help me God I will burn all of your skirts,” he growled. 

“It’s just a flesh-wound, Katz,” he huffed back, lifting his injured leg into the air to prove his point. It hurt like a bitch. “No need to get your kosher little panties in a twist.”

“Panties can’t be-- never mind, I’m not going to argue semantics with you while you’re bleeding out on the fuckin’ floor.”

Before Klaus could accuse him of being a drama queen he found himself being hoisted up into the air bridal style, his legs dangling limply over Dave’s left arm. He tried not to look at the red smearing across the other man’s tanned skin. Billy and Kowalski both looked nauseous, Kowalski holding Klaus’ bloody jacket in his hand and Billy clutching to Gurney’s arm like it could keep him from falling over. Klaus really didn’t want to know how much the dry cleaning bill was going to cost. 

When they crossed the threshold and the group was thrust into the cold spring air the panic began to set in. Holy fuck, he’d just been shot. In the leg. There were so many ways that could fuck him over -- what if he got discharged, or he bled out because his brother wasn’t that great of an aim and nicked an artery or something, what if he woke up in the next life as a soccer mom named Patricia and had to tote around a garden’s worth of kids? Klaus wasn’t ready to be a father so he really hoped that last one wouldn’t happen. He didn’t really want any of them to happen but, to Klaus, the life of a soccer mom was a fate worse than death.

“Not to be a party-pooper or anything but, uh, what the fuck are we going to do?”

That was Bono. He was bouncing up and down as they walked, radiating nervous energy to the point where Klaus could almost choke on it. It was a valid point, though. Klaus was so busy weighing their options that he barely even noticed when time slowed down. Dropping his head so it lolled backwards he watched as a man, somewhere in his sixties he supposed, strolled over. A trilby hat was pulled low over his face but Klaus could just make out the eyes he’d grown up with. Well, that confirmed his suspicions. 

“Hello, Five,” he greeted airily. “You got old.”

“We need to talk,” Five said, the worn and weary expression not suiting him at all. 

“Yeah, I’ve actually got a bone to pick with you -- who the fuck shoots their favorite sibling?”

“You’re not my favorite sibling,” Five snorted. “But you are the most intriguing, I’ll give you that much.”

“Oh? How so, little-big brother?”

“You have two death records,” he started, cocking his head to the side. “One approximately three months ago -- gunshot right to the head, if I remember correctly. The other takes place /after/ the apocalypse is supposed to happen so I’m sure you know which one I’m rooting for. But what I’m curious about is why the Commission would make you my target. I’m assuming you know what that is by this point?”

“Oh yeah, Hazel and Cha-Cha suck Pogo-dick.”

Five nodded succinctly, agreeing with that statement to some extent. He rounded Dave until Klaus was no longer looking at him upside down. 

“My theory is that I did something -- the future me, that is -- to split the timeline in two halves and now there are two versions of you. One living and one dead -- split off from whenever you came to this time period if I had to wager a guess. If you die now the universe would overlook the mistake like it was a skip in a record and, when you awake, you’ll be a wiser man. You /can’t/ die right now as far as it’s concerned -- your death is set in two points of time. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. The Commission seems to think that killing you now would rewrite your existence or something to that effect.”

“I feel like you’re gonna have to pull out an orange and a few bendy straws before I understand a word you’re saying, mein bruder.” 

The older Five thought for a moment, trying to formulate exactly how to dumb down what he was going to say.

“The commission sent me to kill you in the hopes that it would reset the timeline. My theory is that if you die now, in the same way the other you did, you’ll bounce back and the other you will cease to exist. Maybe you’ll live on with the memories of the other one, who knows. My point is: you’re not supposed to be here, not like this.”

“You don’t seem much like my Five, you know. That might be the blood loss talking, though.”

The other man cleared his throat, eyes cast downward to avoid Klaus’ gaze. He wasn’t exactly the same as the Five that came back from the apocalypse, that much was for certain. Klaus wondered if he was part of that other timeline and if he was going to disappear, just like Gurgle. 

“You have more potential than you know, Klaus. Maybe more than all of our siblings combined. So for both of our sakes I hope that I’m right, and I hope you get the chance to explore that potential.”

“How uncharacteristically nice of you.”

God, Klaus could be annoying. Not that it made what Five had to do any easier, or made him feel any less guilty. If his plan didn’t work he would have killed his brother and there was no easy way to fix something like that. Time was just too fickle to mess with like that.

“I’m going to shoot you now,” Five gritted out. “You’re going to have to trust me, okay?”

Klaus nodded at his older brother and, a moment later, felt the cold heat of a bullet in his skull. He couldn’t bring himself to be angry about it, not really. He’d had the proper warnings, he’d been told what was going to happen. Maybe there could have been a bit more of an explanation but, when Klaus was toppling backwards and watching Five’s face float out of his vision, he couldn’t really be anything but relieved. He felt vaguely like a flower pot in a Douglas Adams film extravaganza. 

[Oh, here we go again,] he thought. 

And then he was looking at a bored little girl, who was wrinkling her nose and griping about something or another. Klaus was a bit too busy processing his death to really care. She went on and on about how he was pale, how he was too young to die and honestly, what did he think he was doing, getting shot like that? Klaus hadn’t been admonished by someone so tiny since Vanya got angry about him stealing a handful of chocolate violins out of her purse. 

“I can’t believe you would go and get yourself killed so easily, it’s entirely disrespectful.”

He shrugged.

“If it helps any, my brother gave me a permission slip.”

The little girl crossed her arms and furrowed her eyebrows, the perfect picture of displeasure etched onto her face.

“One of you messed with the timeline,” she stated, the realization just dawning on her. “Was it you? Or was it that brother of yours -- Fievel or something like that?”

“I don’t really know, honestly, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. He said something about me coming back but as far as I know, whatever messed up the timeline,” he made a circular flapping gesture with his right hand. “Hasn’t happened yet. Say, you got a smoke I can bum?”

Another withering glare -- Klaus wasn’t phased.

“I didn’t think so. So, uh, not that I’m not enjoying this and all, what happens now? This timey-wimey bullshit is hurting my brain.”

“You go back,” she sighed, annoyance coloring her voice. “The universe isn’t ready for you to die yet. It needs you, I guess you could say. I’m starting to regret giving you overgrown monkeys free-will, you only unnecessarily complicate things.”

“Go back? How? I can’t just, I dunno, un-shoot myself.”

“It’s simple, Klaus. You just wake up.”

Klaus watched as she snapped her fingers -- a bright white light blinded him momentarily and he was crushed under the weight of what felt like six sandbags being dropped on his stomach. He was on the ground, he registered after a moment, and there was blood dripping down the bridge of his nose. He could taste iron, could feel his brain matter being ripped into, but when he lifted his fingers to touch his wounds he found nothing there.

What he did find, however, was that Gurgle was gone and he remembered everything.


	6. Business As Usual -- Monday, July 1st, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which men get ravished, Klaus is perpetually confused, and James is panicking in the background.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Accidents Will Happen by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
> 
> Hi, I'm exhausted and I'm sorry this chapter is a few hours later than normal!!

An upside of being dead and coming back to life is that the wound in his skull and the wound in his leg both healed significantly quicker than they should have. The one in his brain went away almost instantaneously, thank God, and the other healed within the span of a week -- not that he’d waited around for the full week in the infirmary. No, he’d gone back to active duty service a few days after the incident, much to the chagrin of Dave and Kowalski.

“You were shot in the leg, for Christ’s sake, I think you can take more than week off,” Dave had griped. 

Neither of them knew about the visit from his brother -- if they had he’d probably be discharged on grounds of insanity, or they would force him into bed-rest for another week because he’d knocked his head too hard. Klaus thought it was better that way. 

One of the commanding officers had committed the grave mistake of putting Klaus in charge of taking inventory and, by extension, cleaning up the mess. Everyone knew that his cleaning habits were a bit unorthodox and setting him loose in the kitchens was possibly the worst idea of the century, next to starting the war in the first place. It had been a few months since the last purge -- thus Private Hargreeves was taking his job /very/ seriously and was fully committed to the task of deep cleaning his woes away.

"Beyner?" Dave called out when from the entrance, eyes not yet adjusted to the dark.

He'd gotten the nickname his fourth or fifth month in Vietnam, after his frail body refused to put on any more weight than was absolutely necessary. By all accounts he was perfectly healthy, aside from the leg that was almost completely healed, but he was thin and skinny -- Bones, they called him. Beyner was specific to Dave. It was Yiddish, as far as Klaus knew.

In response there was a faint crash from the back of the mess tent.

"Back here," Klaus called. His voice went up an octave, like it always did when he was getting up to trouble. "Mind the glass, yeah?"

Dave decided that he didn't want to know and considered extending the don't ask, don't tell policy to bizzare events involving gay -- or pansexual, in this case -- men and glass in dark places but it would be for the best if he investigated. He couldn't have Klaus getting court martialed for something stupid.

“What're you doin’ back there, kid?”

He peeked around a shelf, getting an eyeful of a shirtless Klaus sifting through dishes, pots and pans strewn everywhere. He was pretty sure he could see a bottle of vinegar next to the other man.

“Disinfecting,” Klaus said proudly. The two pots in his lap rattled violently in his endeavor to reach for the scrubber. “What brings you here, Davy?”

Dave kicked the brush into Klaus’ reach, earning a pleased chirp from the other man, and he watched with mild interest as he scraped the grime off of a dish old enough to be from the prohibition. There was a tiny, portable television set up in the corner, and through the static there was the occasional news clip. His suspicions told him that Klaus was waiting for something -- he’d never really cared for the news, even if he did inexplicably /know/ things beforehand.

“I was wondering if you wanted any company.”

“Oh, I could always use some of that, Major Handsome,” Klaus snickered, patting the spot beside him. The TV groaned and flickered into another bout of news reports. It was something about disappearances, murders, various things that no-one wanted to see in the middle of a war. Klaus seemed particularly focused on a section about a blue flash, and an unidentified group of people fleeing from the scene. Dave lowered himself to the ground with a grunt.

“How’s your leg doin’? James is shittin’ himself with worry, I think.”

“Our sweet little hick, worrying about little ol’ me. My leg’s much better now, you two can relax.”

The aforementioned leg was stretched out, the fabric of his fatigues ruffled around the painfully obvious bandage beneath his clothes. He could walk without help, usually with minor complaining or someone’s assistance on a bad day, yet the guys continued to worry and hover over him. He felt the warmth of Dave’s arm when it knocked into his shoulder. Dave didn’t pull away.

“You really can’t go anywhere without getting into trouble, huh?”

He wasn’t sure when the atmosphere of the room had changed but Dave was looking at him fondly and Klaus felt himself heating up, eyes darting from the Jewish man’s eyes to his lips, and back up to the hazel. 

“I guess not,” Klaus muttered, a low laugh tumbling out. “It’s my middle name, you know.”

Dave was the one to move, thank God, and Klaus whined involuntarily when the warm, soft lips he’d first seen nearly half a year prior smashed against his. It was gentle, soft, and yet their teeth clacked together due to the excitement -- or maybe it was because Klaus couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot. He never thought that this would happen, that Dave would have any interest in him, but when they were kissing and Klaus was being carefully rolled into Dave’s lap, Klaus couldn’t imagine things being any other way. Everything was so perfect, and he felt safe and /needed/.

They broke apart when the air started getting too thin.

“Thought I was gonna have to mail you a written invitation, Beyner,” Dave muttered, nosing the junction of Klaus’ jaw and neck. 

“Jesus, James would have lent you the stamps,” Klaus choked around a giggle.

Klaus yelped when he felt the scrape of teeth over his carotid artery -- not enough to bleed or leave a bruise, just enough to make him squirm. The pinch went away quicker than the exhilaration did. When he was sufficiently ravished, Dave pulled away, patting his hips firmly. 

“Alright, Hargreeves, I got shit to do.”

The younger man clambered off of him and was rewarded with a languid kiss, a slip of paper, and a promise to meet him later on. He felt like a tub of jelly and his legs didn’t seem like they could support his weight. And then he saw green, and was met with doleful, sunken orbs on the far end of the room. The television continued to drone on.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” he muttered. “I get enough of those looks, I don’t need them from you too, ghostie.”

The other version of Klaus just stared longingly, a sad look in his eyes that he couldn’t help but wince at. This ghost, as much as he reminded him of Gurgle, was lacking the hole in his skull, and /not/ lacking a jaw. So it shouldn’t have been too surprising when he spoke -- Klaus jumped anyway, almost dropping fine china.

“I’m not a ghost, dumbass. Well, not anymore, though I can’t say that this is much different than before.”

So it /was/ Gurgle. Klaus wished that the shit in his life made sense, but he was constantly rewarded with the weird day to day confusion his family was known for and would likely never understand what was going on within his own mind, let alone in the world around it. So the best he could do was take things with a grain of salt, accept defeat, and move on. His brother’s body was a gateway to another fucking realm and spat out tentacles, it couldn’t get much weirder than that.

“Oh, fabulous. I’m hallucinating.”

“Hallucination-smallucination, it’s not that different from what you do normally.”

The living Klaus gave a one fingered salute, still not completely sold on the fact that he was talking to something that legitimately wasn’t there and was entirely in his head. That’s the type of shit he’d taken years to move on from -- it took him an eternity to accept that he wasn’t hallucinating the ghosts around him, took ages to convince the /therapists/ that they weren’t hallucinations, so he wasn’t enjoying the conversation one bit, no sir. 

“I swear to fuck, if I have to go to therapy again I’m going to shoot myself in the god-damned face.”

Gurgle arched an eyebrow -- one that reminded him of the bullet wound he’d recently suffered, and Klaus refrained from throwing something. 

“Something tells me the little girl in Heaven wouldn’t be happy about that, bud.”

“Well she can kiss my ass.”

He was slightly concerned that thunder and lightning would erupt from the sky and when it didn’t come, he slumped against the counter. Gurgle regarded him with an odd expression and, after a minute of shuffling around, sat on a particularly large pile of pots. He was snarkier than Klaus, more guarded and quick to judge, but he could see the hints of softness that they shared.

“For what it’s worth, I’m happy for you.”

Klaus glanced up -- it was his turn to arch a brow. He briefly wondered just how different they were from each other, coolly observing the halluci-ghost, who was preening on his perch. There was an air of superiority, maybe some extra confidence, and Klaus noted that he hadn’t seen any signs of a dependence on drugs. 

“Getting shot in the face really changes a person, huh,” Klaus quipped. “I think you’ve got some wires crossed or something, you should get that looked at.”

“I’m being serious, you asshole.”

Klaus blinked and Gurgle’s jaw was gone again, his hands flying in well-oiled sign language. It looked something like a shovel talk, which was odd because it was essentially Klaus giving /himself/ a lecture. He blinked again and Gurgle was back to the new normal, jaw intact and voice capable.

“I wish I’d had the same experience.”

“Yeah,” Klaus murmured distantly. “He’s amazing.”

“Don’t take it for granted this time, yeah?”

He wondered if Gurgle had let the opportunity slip through his fingers in his timeline. The hurt and sadness in his eyes painted a picture of what might have happened, but also one of grateful relief. Like he was happy that one of them got shit right. Even if Dave was the one who had to move first and he was still recovering from the shock of Dave, /his/ Dave, kissing him full on the lips.

“I won’t.”

“Good, ‘cuz you’ve got dishes to finish and a man to seduce, lover boy.”


	7. Till We Meet For The First Time, The Last Time -- Saturday, October 5th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which timey-whimey shit gets out of hand, Klaus is still confused, and Dave lurks in the background.
> 
> AKA: Klaus has too many soft squishy feelings towards the guy who shot him in the face, the timeline continues to be fucked, and there's talk of exploding turkey in the mess-hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Something Stupid by Frank Sinatra
> 
> This chapter was pretty much the first thing I wrote for this fic, so it's a bit of a mess? I changed a few things around and such, but this is pretty much exactly what started the story in the first place and there's little to no editing involved.

"Hey, Bones!"

Klaus twirled around, teetering on his feet as he looked for the source of the voice. He'd been eating, or trying to at least what with how crowded the mess could get, and the MRE mush he'd been scarfing down threatened to spill out of his overstuffed cheeks. 

"Hmm-hmm!" he gave a halfhearted salute whilst still holding his fork. 

"What's the soup of the day, kid?"

Klaus struggled to swallow, finally managing it with an audible gulp, and thumped his chest a few times to dislodge what he assumed to be a fist-sized ball of sludge. God, food in 'Nam was drier than Five's sense of humor.

"Chili and macaroni, sir."

"Christ, I don't know how you can eat that shit."

"There's nothin' like mom's cookin', huh, sir?"

"Was your mom a sadist?" he asked. A guffaw wormed its way out of Klaus' lungs when the other man wrinkled his nose.

"Nah," he dismissed with a wave of his hand. His expression suddenly grew serious as he thought back to his mother. "She was more of a-- a pacifist, I think. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Never even raised her voice, now that I think about it."

And then the furrowed eyebrows were gone, a grin replacing the slight pout. He snickered, remembering the times when he and Diego would discretely squirrel food away when she wasn't looking.

"None of us had the heart to tell her that her cooking was horrid. Hell, the stuff was a fire hazard, you could light a match on the other end of the house and -- poof! No more Thanksgiving dinner."

He finally put the fork down, he was going to poke somebody's eye out if he kept gesturing with it, and Sergeant Dunahee watched him with an amused expression. 

"I'm assuming you didn't come to talk about exploding fowl, sir?"

"No, as much as I'd like to sit here and listen to you ramble, your presence is required in the med-tent, Private."

This caught Klaus' attention. His MRE lay forgotten on the table.

"What happened, sir? Was it someone in our platoon?"

"I think you should go see for yourself, kid."

Master Sergeant Dunahee gripped his shoulder tightly, sending him a weary smile. And then Klaus was running -- he left his jacket on the table and barely had the sense to pull his boots on before he was flying out of the mess and racing across the camp. His tags jingled with every step and he ducked and wove between the buzzing day-to-day life he'd grown used to. He only just missed getting hit by a pail of water.

He didn't know what he expected to find. Maybe Dave, battered up and asking for him, maybe James Kowalski saying his final goodbyes. But when he stumbled wide eyed and breathless into the medical tent Dave was standing perfectly healthy off to the side, arms crossed and a look of concern etched onto his beautiful face, and Kowalski was nowhere to be seen. 

"What's wrong?" Klaus panted. He jerked a thumb towards the entrance of the tent. "Sergeant Dunahee said you needed me here? I know I'm pretty but there's only so much--"

Beauty can fix, he was going to say.

Dave interrupted him with a gentle point to the second cot from the door. 

"He says he's your brother."

"Oh, holy shit." 

There lay an exhausted and exceptionally bruised Five. His wrist was cuffed to the bed -- Klaus wouldn't be surprised if he'd tried to gouge someone's eyes out -- and he looked to be asleep. He could almost be seen as innocent when he slept, eyes closed and doll like features prominent against the cushions of his bed.

Klaus felt a wave of love, something almost like parental instinct, crash over him as he inched closer to his brother. It hadn't been that long since they'd seen each other, in the scheme of things. Three months, maybe four, had passed but it felt like an eternity. He’d also had time to reflect on just how much he missed his siblings, and how much he wanted to be close to them.

Dave's gaze followed him as he crossed the room. He wore an odd expression -- one of surprise, affection, and most of all, carefully guarded worry. 

"Hey, Five-O," Klaus practically cooed. He'd finally made his way to his bedside to sit gingerly on the edge. He couldn't help but reach out and card his fingers through the messy black hair falling into his brother's face, like he was trying to reassure himself that it was real.

Now that he was closer, Klaus got a good look at his older, younger, /grumpier/ sibling. He looked like he'd picked a fight with someone much bigger than him -- and he probably had, again, Klaus wouldn't be surprised -- knuckle shaped bruises littered his face and he saw the distinct shape of a hand-print etched into the kid's right cheek. The rest of his body must not have been in much better shape because Klaus could hear him struggling to breathe. It sounded like something in his lungs was rattling and the soft wheeze that Five made every time he inhaled made Klaus furious. Fifty-eight or no, this was still his little brother.

"How long are you going to keep petting me?" 

He didn't sound as put out as he normally did, which Klaus chalked up to the overwhelming exhaustion, and his green eyes fluttered open. Maybe he was literally fueled by spite, who knew.

Klaus retracted his hand sheepishly.

A pensive frown appeared on Five's face as he reached out with his shaking, not handcuffed arm, and patted the taller man's head. Dave snorted from his corner.

"You seem different," Five muttered. The skin between his brows creased. The poor thing sounded concerned, /upset/ even. Like he missed his junkie brother milling around the house. Klaus was struck by the notion that this Five, his Five, was not the same man he’d seen last. The man who shot him might never return, not that Klaus had fully grasped that situation to begin with. 

"I'm three and a half months clean, baby," Klaus grinned and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. "You, on the other hand, are high as a kite."

"What'd they give me?" Five carefully and slowly sounded his words out to avoid slurring them. He lifted his head from the pillow and glanced around the room wearily.

This time it was the doctor who spoke up -- Doctor Spragg.

"Some morphine, a sedative. Nothing near as potent as the shit Klaus used."

"What can I say, I was a frequent flyer," Klaus quipped. He wondered what rewards he could have gotten, more than a little amused by the thought.

"Oh," Five mumbled, his head dropping back onto the pillow. 

Klaus hated to break the comfortable silence between the two, or three if you counted lover-boy in the corner, but something was gnawing on his brain.

"Why'd you come, Five? Not that I'm unhappy to see you, I just-- didn't really think any of you would notice I was gone. You least of all, actually."

His brother pulled a face. He'd never learned to read Five's expressions, so he remained just as lost as he was before, sitting on the edge of the bed and perched precariously close to thin air. Five's fingers came up to tangle in his dog tags, yanking him down slightly so he could read the small lettering. 

HARGREEVES, KLAUS, it read. It was followed by a slew of useless, forgettable numbers, the man's blood type, and a blank spot where there should have been a religion. Five's thumb swiped over the empty metal before tracing over each individual letter.

"We didn't notice that you were gone at first," Five admitted, something like shame coloring his voice. He couldn't look Klaus in the eye. "It was Diego who pointed it out. You hadn't come home in three days which was strange, even for you."

Five let go of his tags unceremoniously. Hello and goodbye flashed into view when Klaus tried to catch himself from falling.

"I decided to do some research. Checked all of the records, scrubbed every database I could think of. I looked through every single obituary, pages and pages of eulogies, and I got nothing. Not a single shred of evidence that you even existed."

It was odd, Klaus thought. Five looked seconds away from crying -- his lip was quivering, his eyes were glassy. He looked so guilty, like he would do anything to fix what he'd broken. Five had never been one to cry, and Klaus couldn't fathom that he would one day be the reason why.

"You were hiding in plain sight," Five continued. A few tears had slipped down his cheeks then, though he swatted Klaus' hands to the side when he tried to wipe them away. "I found you in a bar. Your picture was on the wall, right under some sappy poem about war heroes. You /died/, Klaus. You just fuckin'--."

That was all it took for Klaus to properly climb onto the bed, scooping his brother up into a hug whilst trying to mind the wires and tubes under the other boy's skin. His fingers rubbed circles into Five's back whenever he hiccuped out a sob. God, the morphine was really doing a number on him -- he never let himself show this much compassion, or emotion, if he could help it. It was like he was really thirteen, though they both knew better than that. 

"How'd it happen, Fiver?"

Five angrily wiped his tears away, pushing at his brother until he was sitting up again. It took a few shuddering breaths for him to calm down completely, but he composed himself before speaking. There was something to be said of dignity.

"You were rescuing a-- rescuing a kid -- said he'd reminded you of someone. Just as you got him to safety, you got shot," Five tapped Klaus' forehead with his pointer and middle fingers. "One bullet, right here."

"Then I won't save any kids," Klaus said, sly grin overshadowing how unnerved he was. He reached up and gripped Five's fingers, pulling them down to his chest, right above the pounding heartbeat he thought he'd always possess. "I'm not going anywhere."

"I wish it were that easy."

He looked like he was fading out again, which was reasonable given the strain of time travel and the plethora of drugs he had running through his system -- he had enough morphine in him to put down a small horse and he was physically a child. Five gripped onto the warm material of Klaus' shirt as he swayed back and forth. And then the grip was gone and Klaus was gently lowering his brother, smaller and younger only in appearance, down to lay flat in the bed.

This Five didn’t remember shooting him, he realized. So what was he doing there? And what in God’s name had he done to split the timeline in two?


	8. Ma Cherie, You Should Get Some Sleep -- Tuesday, October 8th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which someone familiar drops in, Klaus gets hit for worrying them, and Klaus is too tired to be confused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan
> 
> Poor, sleep deprived Klaus.

Klaus was in the middle of getting a good night's sleep, or trying to at least, when through the silence there was a flash of blue, a bang, and then a tiny body on top of his. He was just about to tell Five off for waking him up -- honestly, he needed his rest if he was going to put up with the war's shit -- but the eyes that looked down at him, blown wide and confused, weren't Five's. They were brown, for one, but they obviously belonged to a woman, and the freezing cold hands that skirted around his ribs could only belong to one anxiety-ridden sibling of his. Diego ran hot, Allison felt like a whisper, Luther was too big and leathery to ever feel cold, Five practically burned with energy, and Ben was dead.

That left one -- she'd always had clammy and cold hands, had always huddled close to the even numbers for warmth.

“Vanya--?” he tried to ask, quickly getting smothered by five feet of insistent violinist. 

Klaus nearly squealed when her fingers touched his bare skin, /god/ they were cold, and the brief thought of her being a ghost made him snort. Upon sitting up she wrapped her arms and legs around him like a home-sick koala and, to Klaus’ growing amusement, refused to let go. Dave watched with an eyebrow raised, sitting up lazily in his cot.

“She's my sister,” he'd mouthed, somehow managing to lift them both up to where he was standing, and Vanya was wrapped up in his arms. 

He could feel a warm wetness in the crook of his neck -- tears, if he wasn't mistaken -- and he felt a pang of sympathy in his chest. It took all of two seconds for him to step into his muddy, worn out boots, and haul his sister out into the warm jungle air. It wasn't completely silent, that was impossible in the middle of a war, but the camp was the quietest it had ever been. Hushed whispers floated from the tents, the water of a nearby creek flowed steadily downward, but there were fewer pops and bangs, less gunpowder being wasted. Both sides were getting tired. 

“I'm so sorry, Klaus,” Vanya whimpered into his bare shoulder, clutching to him like he would fly away. “I'm sorry we didn't come to find you sooner.”

She was the second sibling in the span of twenty-four hours to show such remorse, and to care so much about Klaus’ well-being, that he was taken aback. They'd never actively hated him but the siblings, apart from Ben and an occasional Diego, had always had trouble getting close to him, to form a solid connection with him. He was also far too tired to even question how his sister was there in the first place.

“It's okay, I'm okay,” he shushed her swiftly. “See, I don't even have a scratch on me!”

Well, not that she could see, anyway. The wound in his leg throbbed under the extra weight and the dull ringing in his ears was a constant reminder of the bullet his brother had unloaded in his brain. He was bruised and scraped all to hell but that was par for the course. 

Vanya sniffled, lifted her head, and grimaced at him. If she weren't clinging to him for dear life, she would have reached out and touched his cheekbone with feather-light fingers.

“You have a black eye,” she pointed out dully.

“Huh? Oh-- oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that,” he muttered, a laugh threatening to bubble up. “You should see the other guy, I really did a number on him.”

“What did he do?” 

She was distracted from tears, he noted triumphantly. That was a win in his book, even if it meant that he would be fussed at and scrutinized for putting himself in harm's way. The black eye wasn’t exactly his fault, for once, but he had thrown the first punch. He told her as much, arms getting weary of supporting her weight. He didn’t care about that, though, and was content to continue carrying his tiny, baby sister, until his arms popped out of his fuckin’ sockets. It’d been a long time since he’d seen her last, he figured he was allowed.

“He pulled some shady shit trying to get a nurse’s attention,” Klaus huffed out. “So I decked him right in his massive honker and got a black eye in return -- it was great, though, you should have seen his face.”

He pulled a lot of stunts like that, the typical hero shit you saw in movies. When he was in his right mind he was a down-right saint and was ready to deck any-one, anywhere. He was like a modern day pre-serum Captain America without the asthma, Dave had said once -- but if anyone could fill the shoes of the Captain himself, Klaus would peg Dave as the best candidate. 

“I thought you were a pacifist?”

“We’re in the middle of ‘Nam, baby. What’s a few punches when you’re getting shot at everyday?”

Vanya went silent at that, but from the twitch of her brow and the pout of her lip, Klaus could tell she was thinking hard about something. Last time remembered seeing that face, she asked him if he was interested in Billy Parker down on 7th Avenue, or if they’d kissed from the back row of the theater. She was right on both accounts, which made things a bit awkward when she almost outed him in front of their father.

“How long have you been here?”

There it was -- Klaus knew that the question would pop up eventually and Vanya, poor, sweet Vanya, was too observant to let something like that slip under the radar undetected. He told her the truth.

“Around ten months. I got here in December of nineteen-sixty-seven and it’s nineteen-sixty-eight now.”

“Ten months,” Vanya echoed. “Jesus. That’s almost a whole year.”

“A year of fun in the sun, as we like to say. You could sweat out any high in an instant down here -- it’s a shithole, really.”

“You’re clean?” she sounded hopeful, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be excited just to be let down again.

“Oh, yeah, baby. I’ve been clean for three and a half months. It would be six or seven by now but I, uh, I got shot! Hurt like a bitch and the morphine they gave me really put a damper on the whole sobriety thing.”

Vanya bristled, finally letting him put her down -- it was hard enough to hold her when she was being still, her squirming was making things all kinds of difficult -- and once on the ground she crossed her arms and did her best impression of Allison’s mama-bear face.

“You let yourself get shot, in Vietnam. Without the medical expertise of the twenty-first century.”

“Well, it was that or let Billy or Gurney get shot up and we couldn’t have that -- Billy probably wouldn’t survive all of the blood loss and Gurney’s the only one who could have carried our sorry asses back home.” 

“Where did you get shot?” she asked calmly. Klaus was glad that she and Dumbledore didn’t share the same definitions of the word. “Arm, back, hip, what?”

“It was my leg,” he supplied, shifting as far away from Vanya’s hitting range as he could get. “Right in the thigh, but it healed up pretty quick.”

Klaus flinched away from the flurry of hands that shot out in his direction, Vanya’s palms clipping one of his shoulders. She was the epitome of unrestrained fury, which would be scary enough under normal circumstances but this was his tiny, harmless sister, who he’d never had the misfortune of seeing genuinely angry. He was sure that this wasn’t the furthest she could be pushed but it was frightening all the same.

“And. You. Let. Me. Climb. You?!” she asked, punctuating each word with a smack. 

He winced, holding his hands palm-forward in a placating gesture. He dropped down onto his haunches and leaned back against the dipterocarp tree behind him, letting his legs splay out. His shoes were untied, his hair was a mess, his shirt was somewhere in the barracks, and he was too tired to stand. He was running on two or three hours of sleep, despite his best efforts, and while sitting on the wet ground wasn’t the best idea, it was far more comfortable than swaying on hit feet.

“Van, it’s been three months, I’m not going to shatter.”

She didn’t look convinced, so Klaus went the extra mile and tugged up the leg of his fatigues, up and over his knee to the lower part of his thigh, to reveal the white scarring left behind. The doctors, as experienced as they were, were dreadfully confused at how quickly he’d healed -- they’d had the discharge papers ready to go and everything -- and when he scarred over in a matter of days they couldn’t do anything more than scratch their heads, mutter out exclamations of surprise, and send him back to work where he was needed. He was a medical mystery, a miracle, whatever you wanted to call him. He figured God would just call him stubborn, the lovely bugger she was. 

“How did it heal so fast?”

Quick as a blink she was on her knees, poking at her brother’s leg like she expected it to talk or do tricks. He just shrugged, digging around in his pants for a cigarette and a lighter -- it took him a moment or two longer than it should have but he emerged victorious, an obnoxiously loud lighter and a mostly empty pack of fags in his hand. It took him all of two seconds to light one, the maneuver well rehearsed over the course of the past few years.

“Dunno,” he said, exhaling. “Maybe I’m just lucky.”

Vanya made grabby hands and Klaus, being the loving big brother he was, tossed her a cigarette and held out the lighter for her to take. 

“You’ve never been lucky in your life,” Vanya commented, a ghost of a smile on her lips.

“I got here, didn’t I?”

He couldn’t have gotten luckier than he did -- he landed in Vietnam, yes, but he landed in front of the man he could see himself marrying, spending the rest of his life with. He landed in a place he could thrive and where everyone was going through their own shit, coming together and becoming a makeshift family. He’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

During the minute or two of comfortable silence, something occurred to Klaus.

“Shit, we’re gonna have to get you some tags.”


	9. The People Worth Fighting For -- Thursday, October 17th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I-- am running out of summaries and songs, so whoops

Instead of explaining exactly how Vanya was in the camp, Klaus resorted to the plan of sneaking her under the radar -- that involved somehow getting her dog-tags, sliding her into a low-ranking position, and telling white little lies until his nose fell right the fuck off, which thankfully didn’t appear to be necessary -- Gurney and Kowalski immediately took a shine to her and were more than excited to get up to trouble, even if that entailed sneaking in fake documents and the like. Five was easier to explain away, as they’d decided on the story of him sneaking into the camp on a truck coming in from another outpost. God knew there weren’t enough trucks or vehicles to sneak him back home, so he remained at the camp doing menial tasks and occasionally helping with mathematic issues that came up when trying to plan trajectories, distance, and so on and so forth. Sure, he wasn’t perfect at math -- his current body was a testament to that -- but he was sure as hell better than most of the men in the camp were.

It took two days for Klaus to corner Vanya in the mess, surrounded by James, Gurney, Dave, Billy, and Five, and proudly declare that she was part of the United States military. She’d be working as a nurse, since she had gone to medical school for a brief time before settling on playing the violin for a living. Klaus couldn’t stand to see her on the front lines anyway.

“We got you these, Van,” he’d beamed, presenting her with a new set of dog-tags that had her information emblazoned clearly on the front. 

The dog-tags felt more like a familial bond than the academy tattoos emblazoned on Klaus and Five’s wrists, and while Vanya didn’t really show it, the brothers could tell that she appreciated them more than she let on. Leave it to them to find a war and call it home -- as sad and dangerous as it was, Vietnam /was/ home to Klaus, and was becoming one for the others as well -- and leave it to them to become a real family and gain their identities under the guise of soldiers. 

Vanya’d slipped them on with a quiet thank you, the metal jingling and finally coming to rest on her breastbone. Klaus’ tags were tucked carefully underneath his shirt, and on Five’s wrist there was an old set of tags repurposed to say his name and looped into a bracelet. She’d been surprised by the roaring cheer the men let out, giddy and welcoming to a new sister to the fold, to the family, and she quickly found that she felt accepted. 

The trio started to become infamous around the camp a week into Vanya’s stint as a nurse. Five, as the potty mouthed boy who appeared out of nowhere, and who could shoot his way out of anything. Klaus as the man who knew too much, saw things he shouldn’t, and knew exactly where to step in a minefield. And Vanya, as the bright, albeit meek, nurse who could stitch anyone up in a minute flat, and who brought the best banter to the table of all the medics there. Now that her medication was gone she felt more human, more /alive/ than she ever had before, and she had a purpose to fulfil. The three would keep each other safe and tear the world down to find a means to an end, and that was a dangerous and beautiful commodity in the middle of a war.

Naturally it was the moment they found a rhythm that another flash of blue went off in the near vicinity -- this time it was in the mess, and the mess was very much full. Klaus didn’t want to know the amount of paperwork it would take to explain that one away, but with a glance at Vanya and Five his feet took him to the tent regardless. He could hear the sound of them running behind him over the crunch of grass and sand, but his only concern was finding their sibling, and getting the hell out of dodge. Or worming his way /into/ dodge, but he hoped that one wouldn’t be necessary. 

The minute he ducked under the entrance to the tent, he knew who it was. They smelled like metal and gunpowder, and the knife sticking out of the table was a dead give-away more than anything else. There, on top of one of the tables, was a groggy, disoriented, and slightly drowned looking Diego, and by the look of things he was only just grasping the fact that he was a metaphorical Dorothy and that he was surrounded by buff, gun-wielding munchkins. Before he had the chance to bristle or say something, or try to kill someone, Klaus stepped in.

“Diego, could you maybe come down from there, before you get shot or something?”

“Klaus, I swear if this is another sibling of--,” Klaus told him where he could shove it with a pointed look.

Diego had, reluctantly, gotten off the table at that point, and had yet to reach for the knife still embedded in the shitty plastic, so the lankier of the two leaned across the table and plucked it out. He even went so far as to put it in the back of his fatigues like it was his own. That would undoubtedly get him stabbed under normal circumstances but Diego was confused, tired, and traumatized, so he went with it easily and allowed Klaus to take him by the elbow and steer him into the open air. He looked like he’d gone into shock and for a split second Klaus was worried that Diego would double over and begin hyperventilating. Vanya and Five had been waiting outside and, upon seeing that their brother looked like a drowned rat, Five discretely teleported to the barracks to find a towel or a blanket -- or both, Klaus didn’t follow Five’s thought process.

“Diego?” Klaus asked, dropping to his knees beside the second in command. “‘Ego can you hear me?”

Nothing. Not even a blink or a sign of recognition. The man was practically catatonic and, if Klaus weren’t a sympathetic and loving sibling, he would have said that his brother turned into a vegetable. This called for drastic measures, in Klaus’ opinion, and so he looked at Vanya, gestured for her to back up, and stood up with the straightest posture he could manage. He really hoped it would work and that it didn’t traumatize their brother further -- Klaus didn’t know if he could handle something like that, the guilt would eat him alive and he’d be a walking and talking example of brothering done wrong. 

“Number Two,” he said firmly -- God, he sounded too much like his father. “Get up. The floor is filthy and I won’t have you waste another moment groveling.”

Something registered in Diego’s mind then. Hatred, maybe, or it could have been sheer confusion or disgust. Klaus, however, firmly felt that he’d played his character so truly, so accurately, that he could make himself sick. The ice-water in his veins dissipated when two strong, warm arms wrapped around him. He didn’t know how Diego could make himself so small -- sure, Klaus was freakishly tall, but Diego had never felt so /tiny/ in comparison. Klaus knew Diego was getting his wits about him when the grip on his shirt tightened, though.

“If you ever scare me like that again,” Diego growled, “I’m going to end you and burn all of your skirts, past, present, and future.”

The skirt Klaus had tucked away under his bed was absolutely /quivering/ in fear. He did find the threat endearing, though -- Diego only threatened him when it came to drugs, thievery, or when he was scared. Normally it was followed by a lecture or a stern ultimatum, but this time there was just a stronger hug and the warm puffs of breath on Klaus’ neck. 

“I can’t make any promises, shnookums,” he mumbled around Diego’s arm. “We’re kind of in the middle of Vietnam, if you hadn’t noticed.

Diego, apparently, /hadn’t/ noticed that he was in the middle of one of the most memorable wars of the twentieth century, and he stiffened. Klaus could almost predict the freak-out to the second, but it was thankfully interrupted by Five re-appearing next to their brother with a towel, which he swiftly dropped on Diego’s head like a security blanket. Diego gave up on whatever inner turmoil he was having and dropped to the ground, landing on his ass with a thud.

“I need a nap,” he declared, voice tiny and strained.

He needed more than a nap, admittedly. He needed some booze, some sleep, a god-damned explanation, some food, and most of all, he needed to be reassured that this wasn’t all just some fever dream induced by him breaking a bone or something. Vanya kneeling down behind him and wrapping her tiny arms around his neck seemed to suffice in grounding him to the new reality they were all adjusting to. 

“You also need some documents, some tags, and somewhere /to/ sleep,” Klaus muttered -- he was pinching the bridge of his nose with an impressive vigor. “/God/, Kowalski is gonna kill me, you, and Five.”

“Kowalski?”

“Big guy, shit vocabulary, can’t miss him.”

“You think everyone has a shit vocabulary, Five,” Klaus countered.

“The largest word you know is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and that’s hardly even sensical.”

Klaus waved him off half-heartedly, and took the towel from where it had fallen on Diego’s shoulder, and went about drying his brother’s hair. He wondered exactly how he’d gotten wet in the first place but seeing as his brother was barely responsive as it was, he decided to leave it for a later time. 

“Are you saying it sounds,” Klaus paused dramatically. “Quite atrocious?”

The strangled groan of annoyance from Five was entirely worth the smack upside the head -- especially because it was accompanied by a startled laugh from Vanya, and a bewildered scoff from Diego. They were going to be alright, after all. They were together, safe, and arguably happy -- Klaus considered it a win. 

Even if his brother was dripping water all over the place and his sister was making his life difficult.


	10. Author's Note -- Hiatus

Hi! I'm surprisingly not dead -- I've just been having a rough couple of weeks mentally and haven't found it in me to write anything. I also haven't found it in me to do much of anything productive.

What /have/ I been doing, you ask? Here's a brief list of what I've done the past few weeks.

-knitted a hefty portion of a scarf  
-took many long, depressive showers  
-slept for an impressively long time consecutively  
-drawn a fuck-ton of fanart  
-gotten a girlfriend (yay!)  
-eaten s o m u c h frozen yogurt  
-started reading tarot cards  
-and been threatened by the duolingo owl extensively

I'm not exactly back at 100% and I'm juggling projects like no-one has before, so this is to let y'all know that I will be back in either June or July, and I'll be working on a stricter/more spaced out schedule. My other fic may die off in this time, but I don't intend to let HTHB go so easily! I may also eventually branch off into some Markiplier content because I love him and I think he's a sweetheart and he's been like a safe place for me these past few weeks. I forgot what I was going to type, fuck -- oh! I turn eighteen in exactly three months, isn't that e x c i t i n g? Yeah, I'm actually shitting myself and I've had a perpetual headache after going to the DMV for the third time in a month, somebody please rescue me from my impending adulthood.

Nywho, I will be back in a month or two, and I hope y'all will be just as excited for this story as you've always been! You've been so supportive and sweet and o o f I just wanna hug you all and squish your cheeks, I love you so much. 

Ciao!  
-batcavemasquerade


	11. Author's Note Part Deux

Long story short, I'm back, I'm gay, and I will be posting the next chapter some day-- soonish? Maybe? Somethin' like that, I dunno man, anywho this fic is not dead!


	12. Sunday, Bloody Sunday -- Sunday, October 27th, 1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm a little rusty, so it might take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things! But here is the next chapter of HTHB

The fourth barracks tent from the left was alive and bustling with a mass of arguing bodies on one fine, slow October morning. There would have been a fog rolling in, if there hadn’t been a storm settling angrily above them and soaking polluted rain into the ground, and the moon would have been disappearing behind the clouds to take a day-long nap. Instead the camp was covered in hazy, thick sheets of rain pelting the canvas above the heads of already-disgruntled men. Judging by the beaten up clock on the wall it was approximately three twenty-four in the morning, guards had yet to be changed out, and there was a massive idiot screaming himself hoarse in what the Hargreeves siblings liked to refer to as ‘the lobby’. It was a hell of a lot to deal with before coffee. The mess wasn’t even brewing the coffee yet. And yet, there was insurmountable screaming. 

“Christ, Hargreeves, I didn't know you was family with a--” 

“Larry, if you take that sentence in the direction I think you are, you best hope that there isn't a gun in the near vicinity.”

Klaus. He was standing with his back to a hideous makeshift bookcase, arms crossed and oddly foreboding for the scrawny man that he was. He knew the type of person Larry was and it spoke volumes that he didn’t get along with him. Klaus, as his family knew, got along with most people famously. He wanted to feed this guy raw, unseasoned pesticide most days.

Diego echoed the sentiment by shooting a particularly murderous glare to the man Five, poor kid, had the unfortunate pleasure of bunking with. He must have twitched or reached for one of his knives, which had been confiscated until he could get dog tags, because Five produced a dagger from God-knows-where and offered it up helpfully. He hadn't looked up from his book. At first glance Klaus could see what looked like dark brown, dried blood caked onto the hilt, all coagulated and gross-like and oh-so intimidating. That was a one way ticket to tetanus or several venereal diseases if he ever saw one, and believe you him, he would be a leading authority on that matter. He just wished that the sight didn’t look eerily like chocolate icing with dye number five sprinkled around the edges. He decided to turn his disgust towards his brother, who had his shoes directly on a table that Klaus had the displeasure of eating off of.

“Five, can you please get your legs off of the table, that shit is so unsanitary,” Klaus whined.

He got a middle finger in return and filed the event away for future reference -- he wasn’t going to do the old man’s laundry for him anymore, that was for sure. Fucker could learn to separate his whites on his own.

Allison, naturally, had been the next of the siblings to arrive. Also naturally, the responses to her arrival were somewhat mixed. Some blamed the times, Klaus blamed the assholes. No, scratch that, Klaus blamed Larry in specific -- honestly, did he kiss his mother with that mouth? What did it matter if her skin was the color of Nutella, Nutella was god’s gift to the world and if Larry couldn’t see that, he was obviously using scrambled eggs for a brain -- the hazelnut is where it’s at. Besides, last Klaus had checked, Jim Crow was dead and it was a new age, baby. A bright new age that had no room for jack-asses in the military.

“What, Klaus, this--” Larry gestured to all of Allison like it proved his point. “Just falls out of the sky and into our camp and you want me to accept it? I ain’t got no problems with the other three but Jesus, Hargreeves, get a grip. She doesn’t belong here!”

“Suddenly I feel out of place,” Allison said, sarcasm dripping from her words like molasses.

As if being in the 1960s wasn’t enough, she just had to go and be something of a taboo. Go, Allison! Following in her big brother’s awful example. Klaus was so proud. He watched idly as one of the burlier members of their troop picked up Larson -- yes, his name was an alliteration -- swung him over his shoulder, and traipsed through the crowd that had gathered and out of the green flap that was keeping the storm outside. Klaus made a mental note to kiss that man, full on the mouth, with tongue. With Dave’s permission, of course.

“She does belong here,” Diego said as Larry was carted out of sight. “With the exclusive cool kids club that Klaus and I are running! We even have matching names, how cool is that?”

Five snorted from his chair. His legs were still on the table. Klaus hated when he did that. Vietnam had a nasty habit of turning ex-druggies into germaphobes, it seemed. But hey, could you really blame him? Klaus knew where Five’s shit covered, muddy boots had been and if those boots could talk they would probably tell some disturbing stories. Klaus knew for a fact that they’d seen some shit in the barracks. Horrible, horrible shit.

Like Keith’s ass -- you could knit a sweater with all of the hair growing on that man’s posterior.

“Oh, yes, because the Hargreeves family is a club that has willing participants,” Allison said sarcastically.

“That’s what, five of you’s now?” Kowalski asked from the back. “Which one is this?”

“Allison,” Klaus responded, flapping a hand in Kowalski’s direction because honestly, it was a very stupid question. Vanya, Allison, they were the only two girls in the group, so unless Kowalski was expecting Luther to come out wearing a pink tutu and mascara, which, granted, would be a sight to behold, he thought the answer was pretty obvious. 

Taking that to mean something, Kowalski handed Gurney what looked like ten bucks under the table. Discreetly, of course, meaning that he tossed it in the man’s face and scowled like a pissed off kid during Christmas dinner. Served the man right, Klaus thought smugly, for betting against a man who'd won six separate lotteries. All for five bucks! Kowalski should be trembling in fear before Gurney's gambling prowess. 

"That just leaves Luther," Diego said. 

None of the siblings commented on the glaring elephant in the room -- their last brother, sweet Number Six, the new Cthulhu -- there was no way to tell if he could go back in time with them. Hell, there was no way to tell if Ben was close enough to the time portal to get sucked in, or if the siblings would be able to see him if he was. Klaus assumed the worst. Perhaps that was why he was so jittery, so nerve-wracked and glaringly sober that day. Maybe it was the war. Or maybe it was because Dave was out there on the front lines, doing God-knows-what, and Klaus was stuck at the camp with four of his siblings.

The opening of the barracks tent rustled as Vanya ran out of the mud and the rain and into the shit-show that was their life. She'd been sewing some poor bastard back together and had only just gotten the chance to see what the commotion was about. Five and Klaus immediately noticed that she looked beat and Klaus wiped a smear of blood off of her cheek when she came to lean against his side. Her tiny hands wrapped around his waist and her head burrowed into his warm, freshly cleaned fatigues. Klaus' clothes always smelled like perfume and cigarette smoke -- maybe that's why everyone went to him to keep grounded. Or it could have been because he was the second oldest sibling next to Five, but that just made him feel old.

“Oh, Allison’s here,” she said.

She said it nonchalantly, or as nonchalant as one can get when their siblings keep transporting themselves through time and into the Vietnam War, but that was mostly the exhaustion and the fact that Vanya hadn’t taken her meds in a week and a half -- Klaus would bet even longer, he hadn’t seen her take any while they were still in the Apocalypse Panic. Allison gave her a tiny, nearly imperceptible wave from where she’d decided to sit -- on Five’s bed, Klaus noted smugly. He hoped she got breadcrumbs in it or something, that would teach him a lesson for being a private menace. Klaus would have used the word public but he was relatively sure that Five’s pettiest tendencies were reserved for those in the special hell of siblingdom. 

Klaus draped an arm around Vanya’s tiny shoulders.

“How was the chop-shop?

"Chop-shop?" Allison echoed loud enough for Diego to hear.

He made a vague scissor-like motion with his fingers and offered a gloriously lacking explanation of what exactly Vanya did for a living.

“Gross, as per usual. I had to take a guys kidney out of his spleen. Not even chunks just, the whole damn thing,” she said. She sounded morbidly fascinated by the whole ordeal, nothing like the first time she’d had to cut a guy open. That one was a wild ride -- the poor man still couldn’t look Vanya in the eye when they passed each other. 

“Gross,” Diego agreed. Klaus was disturbed to find that Diego looked gleeful at the description and quickly ventured to change the subject to something mildly less disturbing and intimate. He swallowed the silent scream of paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, playing on a loop in his head and turned his attention to his other sister. 

“So, Allison,” Klaus began cheerily. “Have you ever fancied a position in the fine United States military?”


	13. Not An Update, I'm Still Working On The Next Chapter!

Hi, I'm officially a grown ass adult. Please help,, I'm not equipped for this adulthood thing--

I'm going to be a little busy these next few weeks but I should have the next chapter up soonish? Like a month or so from now if not less!


	14. A Bastard Father Will Bear Bastard Sons - Wednesday, November 20th,1968

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yup, this bad boy is still kicking!! And now we have one more sibling to add into the mix.
> 
> I'm very slightly tempted to start putting a rough draft of a legit book I'm writing on here, but I'm not sure yet! I'm already so slow at updating this in the first place owo

"Jesus Christ, you are one big motherfucker," someone crowed from one of the tents. 

Big motherfucker was right. It was a normal response to seeing Luther, Klaus decided, for a seven foot, towering hulk of monkey meat was not exactly a societal norm -- not in the future, and certainly not in the nineteen-sixties. He was, as advertised, a big ol' hunk of a thing. Man, monkey, same difference. Gorilla sized men landing in the middle of a tent is certainly a diversion from the normalcy, if you could call it normal, of the Vietnam War. He gave Gurney and Kowalski, who were two of the biggest men on site, a run for their money, towering over them both by at least a foot -- that was something that had pissed Diego off to no end, the insurmountable and unreachable height of his brother. Gurney in particular wasn't happy about losing his status as king-of-the-rock.

Klaus had learned a new word from one of the smarter guys in the camp -- 'bivouac' he'd said, telling the siblings that at the rate they destroyed tents it would no longer be an encampment but a bivouac. Klaus would be the undisputed king of the spelling bee if he went with that bad boy. It was spelled b-i-v-o-u-a-c-you-owe-me-twenty-bucks-Jimmy. Klaus was particularly fond of how it was pronounced, because there was a firm ' _whack_ ' at the end.

Which is exactly what Vanya did to Luther when she saw his big fat head enter the med tent -- her words, not Klaus' -- armed with a bedpan and five feet of bottled rage.

"You are the worst," she said before smacking him again. "Brother." Slap. "Ever." Clang!

The last slap left him looking even more dazed and confused than normal. Klaus regularly applauded Vanya’s ability to reduce men to babbling idiots through sheer emotional armament and violence, and he enjoyed it even more so when it was a brother that consistently made their lives a living hell -- both during adulthood and what little childhood they had. 

“Vanya is officially my favorite sibling,” Diego said, eyes wide and full of wonder at the near comical welt growing on Luther’s Forehead. Forehead was capitalized in Klaus’ mind for it was truly a large and sloping thing, and if the thing was going to be so pronounced it might as well get the proper capitalization. It was practically an appendage what with how much Luther furrowed his brows in disappointment. 

“Careful,” Klaus said, snickering. “We don’t need another incident of familial love going too far.”

Allison, who was standing far, far, _far_ in the back of the tent, nearly choked on her own tongue at that and, for all intents and purposes, looked disgusted enough to burst into flames and be reborn as a potted plant. She would be rather striking as a pot of begonias, in Klaus’ opinion, or even some dark purple hollyhocks. He silently vowed to water her every single day if such a thing ever came to pass. Not that such a thing would really be unusual, they had a brother who sprouted a demonic equivalent of calamari from his abdomen and _ate people_. 

Diego gagged at the insinuation, making eye contact with his sister for less than a second, and almost losing his lunch. It wasn’t so much the taboo of it, it was just the idea of Luther getting it on in any sense of the word -- how would that even work, what with the man’s bodily differences? Klaus and Diego had spent far too many nights wondering exactly how monkey genitalia would differ from a human’s, and how Luther could feel anything at all through the rubbery skin of his arms and chest. It really was a medical mystery, but it made for a decent bonding experience during their early twenties. 

“I would really like it,” Vanya said with a wrinkled nose. “If you never said that again.”

Klaus took pity on her and slung his bony arm over her shoulders -- which had begun to gain muscle in the short time they’d been in the military -- his fingers coming to a rest between some of the longer locks of her brown hair. 

“Consider my lips sealed, and locked with a cock,” he said, proud as ever to use a word that made Luther dry heave. 

“Speaking of, where’s Dave?” Diego asked with a pointed expression.

Klaus glowered from his position next to Vanya, mentally strangling his brother with a jump rope -- he always knew exactly what to say to push Klaus’ buttons and Klaus hated it with an intensity akin to that of the fires of hell. Damn Diego and his snide comments, how _dare_ he give Klaus a taste of his own medicine. It was uncalled for, honestly.

“He’s out in the fields doing god-knows-what,” Klaus said with a dramatic hand to his forehead. “Who knows when he will return from the war.”

Diego snickered and threw an apple at Klaus, which naturally hit him straight in the forehead and bounced off to land on the floor at Vanya’s feet. Klaus was always in favor of free food and thus leaned down, picked it up, blew on it, and took a massive bite out of the side. He did this all whilst giving his brother a one finger salute, of course.

“Anyway,” he said around the chunks of fruit that threatened to spill out of his mouth. “Luther you’ve gotta get some dog tags and shit, and unlike the last four times a sibling of mine has fallen from the sky, I’m not gonna help you.”

“How gracious of you,” Luther said dryly.

“It’s not like it’s gonna be hard for you to get tags, big guy, just go up to one of the officers, say ‘hey I’m a big bastard, I got daddy issues, I follow orders, and I can beat people up for ya’ and they’ll probably try and kiss you. You’re the military’s god-damned wet dream.”

“He’s even got the hair for it, it’s like he was born for this,” Diego snorted. “A big ol’ monkey man born to wield a machine gun.”

“He does have the temperament to be a lackey,” Allison piped up from the back. “He may not be a good leader, but he excels at being the teacher’s pet.”

“And he’s a kiss-ass,” Klaus said. “Aren’t you, big guy?”

Luther’s eyes darted between all four of the siblings standing before him -- Five wasn’t present, he was off chastising some of the officers for one mistake or another -- stopping on each one for a few moments. Klaus expected him to fight back, to snarl and grow vicious like he always did, and was shocked to find that Luther dropped his eyes and looked sheepishly at the floor. Even Diego let out a shocked sound that was caught somewhere between a squawk and a question. 

“I’ve really been a shitty brother, haven’t I?”

That was a lot to unpack, Klaus concluded. From the sheepish expression, to the cussing, to his brother backing down from a fight, he was beginning to think that someone else came back in his brother’s body. Diego looked like his jaw had popped out of place and was trying to fall through his skin and onto the floor -- it made Klaus’s jaw hurt from the memory of having it wired shut -- and Allison and Vanya wore similarly incredulous expressions. Allison’s arms kept crossing and uncrossing as if she were trying to decide what stance to take. 

“Yes, I’d say you have,” said a voice that didn’t belong to the five siblings standing in the tent. 

All of the soldiers had piled out out of the tent sometime between the first and second time Vanya hit Luther with the bedpan, which thankfully hadn’t been used, and when Klaus looked over his shoulder he could see his eldest brother, Five, standing with his hands shoved into his pockets and a nonchalantly raised brow, the picture of a stern grandfather in a teeny tiny teenaged body (complete with hormones and resting bitch-face!). He also looked rather terrifying, but Klaus thought that that went without saying and was a norm. He walked over to stand next to Diego, who’d managed to close his mouth.

“But we weren’t exactly a family before all of this anyway,” he pointed out.

Luther looked ready to lay down and die, right there on the tarp, and the tense atmosphere was starting to drive Klaus insane. He couldn’t handle tense shit without a buzz or at least some form of high, and seeing as that wasn’t an option, the best he could do was cut it off at the pass.

“Sarge needs me to go pick up some ammo a little ways off-site,” he started. “Anybody fancy a good ol’ Hargreeves family outing?”

With how quickly everyone agreed, and how grateful Luther appeared for the change of subject, Klaus wondered if it was possible to actually remedy all of the problems that father dearest had pounded into them. He could get back the softer, kinder Diego that wasn’t always fighting for attention, he could have back the Allison that danced around the room with him and shared her skirts. He could even have something new with Vanya, since they’d never had the chance to connect when they were younger. With Dave by his side he could even shape the siblings into more of a family.

For the first time in a long time, Klaus had high hopes, and as they stepped out of the tent and into the night, he looked forward instead of backward.


End file.
